Abstract

films were deposited on (110) surfaces of single crystalline hexagonal . These films adopted the metastable multiferroic structure instead of the stable perovskitestructure. Sharp diffraction peaks with narrow rocking curves were found for all films. The peak widths increased with increasing size of the rare-earth cation. The -axis/-axis lattice parameter decreased/increased monotonically with increasing rare-earth size for these epitaxialfilms. All films exhibited the following epitaxial relationship . The single-phase hexagonal films were kinetically robust against back transformation to the stable perovskitestructure even to thicknesses of .

Received 05 June 2007Accepted 09 November 2007Published online 03 December 2007

Acknowledgments:

This work was supported by the CBC program of the NSF Award No. CHE-0434567 and MRSEC program of the NSF Award No. DMR-0079996. Work at Argonne National Laboratory was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.